The reddit discussion for this post is a telling confirmation of the articles complaints about the community forums/interaction: https://www.reddit.com/r/elm/comments/9a0hc6/elm_019_broke_u...
Maybe Elm needs some sort of "Please do not use this language in production" sign, and no "Community" link at the top of the home page. There's nothing wrong with a group of folks making a language for themselves / their employers, perhaps putting it on GitHub because why not, but not having a home page at all and making it clear that this isn't a stable language for others to use and they will put much more emphasis on the feedback from their own experiences than from others'. There's definitely nothing wrong with them doing that until they get to a 1.0 they're happy with, and then releasing it to the community.
That's the point of 0.X.Y supposedly.
At this point if a project has been around for a long time and has version numbers like that I just assume it’s not real semantic versioning.
Indeed. I think somewhere along the way the line between "programming language" and "programming language implementation" has been blurred, where the language is the implementation. It used to be that in designing a programming language you didn't have to write a single line of code. e.g: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISWIM
I don't think there's anything wrong with the implementation being the language definition, but there has to be time left for reflection.
> Maybe Elm needs some sort of "Please do not use this language in production" sign
Except Evan has explicitly been pushing Elm for use in production. Like, hard. He even tells you how: http://elm-lang.org/blog/how-to-use-elm-at-work
I understand that removal of native modules was required for maintaining (some interpretation of) the promise of being crash-proof, and that it needs to be done before 1.0. My point is exactly that the language isn't at 1.0 yet.
But more than that, my point is about the approach the developers take to the language, not about any specific decision. I'd still have the same comment about an Elm which lacked native modules from day 1, or an Elm where they figured out how to keep native modulea. Not running into breaking changes by luck is different from intentionally prioritizing stability and other people's use cases. It doesn't matter how many people are deploying Elm in production today—it's still a pre-1.0 language and maybe they shouldn't be deploying Elm in production.
Not true on either front. Elm's compiler does not have good error messages, and breaking code is absolutely a problem.
Maybe the Elm website shouldn't advertise the fact that people are using it in production.
One language isn't necessary better, but I do think one can be argued to certainly be less expensive.
Give two teams the same project. One team will use Elm and needs to write 20K lines and figure out some complicated JS interop. The other team uses ClojureScript and will need to write 5K lines and not worry about handling JS libraries. Which team costs more money?
This is false.
> The core team has spent countless hours discussing these topics again and again. People get exhausted explaining and re-explaining themselves until they are blue in the face. Honestly, posts like this are what makes contributors want to quit
This is a disappointing mindset for them to have. If people have questions about design decisions, and express dismay about the real-world effects those design decisions have on them as production users of the software, then it's an opportunity to convert those passionate users into engaged contributors to the core, rather than considering them as abusive adversaries. If you are explaining things until you are blue in the face, that's a bug in your documentation - and sure, bugs are frustrating, but it's the sign of an effective developer to not let them cause emotional distress. (And while the original post was direct in its depiction of the BDFL, it was far from toxic in its wording, and not meant to be an ad hominem attack.)
Instead, the thread is locked, the poster is confused, there's even a slimmer chance of the blogger reintegrating into the community to stave off these types of issues in future releases, and the language is worse off for all of that.
I never made a serious try to get it into production.
It’s now very clear to me there’s no point in EVER trying unless there’s a massive shift in the project.
The community/leadership sounds very broken.
This seems more like what I would expect from someone’s hobby project that got out of hand and accidentally got a bunch of people who follow along no questions asked.
It does, but then you realize he actually advocates using it in production and tries aggressively to grow the community. See e.g. http://elm-lang.org/blog/how-to-use-elm-at-work
dulac91 has been "leaving Elm" starting at least six months ago, supposedly only still around to let others know of his decision.
superdisk and type_level_memes are piling on about how much Elm sucks in multiple comment threads, random examples being "Elm's BDFL is just a DFL" and "Elm is not the language for [me]. Or... anyone, apparently, since writing Elm code can be considered a liability at this point", respectively.
This sort of dismissive toxicity just begets more of it and turns off newcomers.
Sometimes you have to make your point and then leave the theater so others can enjoy the show.
Which is true.
> This sort of dismissive toxicity just begets more of it and turns off newcomers.
Ah yes, legitimate criticism of Elm turns off newcomers so it's entirely justified to ban legitimate criticism. Wonderful.
I understand they are set in their ways and aren't interested in changing the language in ways some people want, but removing any and all posts that criticize them feels more like censorship than anything.
I was told, I was lucky not be be banned from the r/elm.
A month or so later someone else posted on r/elm referencing my prior post. So I replied back and said I was the OP and that I agreed with his view and how nothing has changed. That reply go me banned from /r/elm.
The elm forum has a very strict rules, almost dictatorial [1], Posters who demonstrate a Pattern of participation in Conflict may be banned from any Elm Forum....A Pattern may also arise within a single conversation.
I would have ignored them for what they are and moved straight to talking about what success is.
The fact it got laughs is also very telling of the community.
Like its written by a cute 5 year that thinks they're being clever and nobody will know what they mean is that they will block, delete, and ban anyone ever voicing critical thoughts.
Like how do they ever think that language will improve?
Either say nice things or I ban you.
There is no appeals process.
Under Supreme Leader Evan's rules, apparently talking about puppies would be "Conflict"
...and that Reddit threat certainly doesn't give me any reason to change my mind on any of those points. :)
Edit: I should note, I sympathise with the situation the Elm project is in. The extremely limited resources they have for development mean they have to make some compromises, and I'm not sure they've even made the wrong ones, given their goal. If they waited until a 1.0 version before trying to get adoption the project would lose relevance, so they have to get people to use an unstable beta in production. If they didn't make breaking changes to enforce a vision on the project, you'd end up with a ugly soup like PHP. If they devoted significant time to dealing with the community, they might not get anything done. Golang has charted a similar course but has had way more resources (and still has made a number of people angry); Rust has kept people happier, but in exchange for a much more community-driven vision, and not without cost in terms of false starts and dropped features. Developing a new language as anything more than an exercise is very hard!
I have to admit that I was thoroughly confused at the locking and removal of the thread. It also means I didn't even have the chance to respond that I don't necessarily agree or disagree... I'm a new part of the community.
I'm still going to continue learning and implementing a few small projects that I have planned. However, I'm a little worried that I'm going to be burnt by some in this community calling real needed debate a diatribe and silencing people that don't agree with them.
Furthermore the discussion about type-classes is getting old. YES Haskell has them and NO Elm doesn't have them at the moment or maybe never. It's similar to the Go generic-type flame-wars that emerged in many Go discussions.